So I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed lately and have caught myself forgetting to meet promises here and there, and if I'm catching a couple of them I can only assume it's happening a lot more. As a result I decided to dust off my copy of
Time Management for System Administrators and go through it again. When I first read it, things weren't as busy and we were all working our full 40 hour weeks - not the 32 hour weeks we're down to now, so I didn't really implement much then and slowly the techniques faded.
Anyways, even being an IT professional, I really dislike entering any appointments, tasks, important dates or whatever it might be into my Blackberry or computer. Of the two, I can tolerate the computer and I suppose that wouldn't be so bad if that's the only source I ever had to use to input data. Unfortunately I am often times out of the office at one of our 40 branches and my notebook isn't always up and running, so being able to input data from there isn't very convenient. As a result, I feel much more comfortable with pen and paper, or PAA (personal analog assistant) as Tom Limoncelli calls it in his book.
I decided I would pickup a day-timer or similar, and had my head set on a two day per page configuration hopefully in your standard letter size. This would give me a journal each day to serve as a call log where I can write down calls or voicemails I get and later write them down as tasks or appointments if needed on the appropriate day. I was disappointed when the office store didn't have anything, so I researched online and configured a planner on day-timers website. Sticker shock, for sure... granted I did select the leather zippered ringed binder but it was about $150 for the binder and the paper for inside of it. Paper was about $50 alone.
I did some more research, and I found the
D*I*Y Planner website which has a lot of great tips on time management and organization, but more specifically it has the
Dynamic Templates program I stumbled across which you can use to generate professional looking filler for just about any size organizer binder you can find as well as the option to select from an array of options such as the format of the planner (how many pages per day or week/month/etc), and a lot more. It's free software available for Mac and Windows, and from my short use (about the past half hour) it works great.
I generated a PDF with two-pages per day for the rest of the year and all of next year. Now I just need to pickup a decent zippered ringed portfolio and a 12 pack of beer for the girls in our print shop and I'll have an inexpensive alternative to the day-timer product I was looking at.
